ALLEN JONES, R.A. | STANDING FIGURE (HATSTAND)

Galleria Il Fauno, Turin, where acquired by Carlo Monzino, probably in 1971, by whom gifted to Mr Ferrari, Milan

Acquired from the above by Mr A. Coppola, Milan, from whom acquired by the present owner, 3^rd May 2001 

Allen Jones Figures, Galerie Mikno and Edizioni O., Milan, 1969, illustrated p.75 (one of the edition of 6, as Hat Stand);

Marco Livingstone, Allen Jones: Sheer Magic, Thames and Hudson, London, 1979, illustrated p.71 (one of the edition of 6, as Hat Stand);

Allen Jones, (exh. cat.), Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 1979, cat. no.35, illustrated (one of the edition of 6, as Hat Stand);

Tilman Osterworld, Pop Art, Taschen, Cologne, 1990, illustrated p.48 (one of the edition of 6);

Nicola Hodges and Natasha Roberston (eds.), Allen Jones, Academy Editions, London, 1993, pp.28 and 29, illustrated (one of the edition of 6);

Jackie Heuman, Material Matters: The Conservation of Modern Sculpture, Tate Publishing, London, 1999, fig.78, illustrated p.75 (one of the edition of 6, as Hatstand):

Andrew Lambirth, Allen Jones: Works, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2005, fig.11, illustrated pp.22, 23, and 28 (several from the edition of 6, as Hat Stand);

Mark Francis and Hal Foster (eds), Pop, Phaidon Press Limited, London, 2005, illustrated p.188 (one of the edition of 6, as Hat Stand);

Hans Werner Holzwarth and Laszlo Taschen (eds), Modern Art, Taschen, Cologne, 2016, illustrated p.476, (one of the edition of 6, as Hatstand);

Allen Jones Copied – From A Higher Priced Original, IDEA, 2018, cat. no.1, illustrated (one of the edition of 6, as Hatstand).

We are grateful to the Artist and his studio for their kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.

'On a road trip with Peter Phillips around the whole of the United States in the mid-sixties, we passed through Reno, Nevada. In one of the casinos I photographed slot machines fitted into the carved bodies of wooden cowboys and showgirls. To play a machine required standing close to the figure, eye to eye with a gunslinger or showgirl. If the machine paid out, the cowboy’s raised arm would descend, pointing a gun at your chest. The showgirls, in real wigs and fishnet tights, were an unexpected aesthetic jolt.

At this moment in the sixties there was only a handful of artists, within the avant garde on both sides of the Atlantic, who were making radical figurative sculptures: Ed Kienholtz, George Segal and Marisol in the US, Jan Haworth, Saskia de Boer and, latterly, Nicholas Munro and the American Robert Graham in the UK. All, however, used traditional fine art processes and materials, except Munro, who used fibreglass, a relatively new industrial material at the time.

I was adding shelves or staircases to the lower edge of my pictures that asserted the objective nature of the canvas whilst adding to the illusion of the painted image upon it. I had imagined the staircase to be an invitation to the viewer to enter the picture space, but staircases travel in two directions, implying that the painted figure might come down into my space. Back in England I pursued this novel idea: I envisaged a sculpture free of fine art associations, so that the viewer could confront it without preconception, as if meeting a stranger for the first time. I wanted an idealised, statuesque figure with upraised open arms in a gesture of greeting or defiance, as if saying “here I am”.

I liked the industrial anonymity of window mannequins but not their surrealist overtones. Gem’s Wax Models produced figures for wax work museums including Madame Tussauds. Working with their sculptor Dik Beech I was able to produce a figure without the imprimatura of the artist’s hand or any of the familiar signs that it was 'fine art'.’

Allen Jones, Artist’s Statement, October 2019

Standing Figure (Hatstand) belongs to a seminal group of three ‘furniture’ sculptures that Allen Jones made in 1969 - the others being Table and Chair - which have become icons of Pop Art - not just British Pop (which in the last five years or so is finally getting the recognition that it richly deserves through major museum retrospectives), but of Pop Art as a global phenomenon. They are as recognisable, as immediate, as controversial, as irreducible as anything produced by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Wesselman et al. 

Standing Figure was the catalyst for the subsequent furniture sculptures. Jones had seen an erotic cartoon of a leather clad figure posing as a table and realised the potential of introducing an element of functionality to his sculptures that would further dislocate a viewer’s expectation of what art might be. The Table and Chair sculpture that followed were exhibited almost simultaneously together with the Standing Figure in London, Cologne and New York. As a part of the group the Standing Figure was itself assigned a function and became popularly known as the Hatstand.

In acquiring this new moniker, the work achieved much of what the artist had hoped for - for his sculpture to occupy the viewer’s space, to ‘come down’ from the (fine art) pedestal, and to take on a life of its own. If you want to call it as you see it, then the artist will not correct you. Indeed, in a recent publication on these sculptures, Jones takes great pleasure in reproducing all the various appropriations, reworkings and plagiarism of the ‘furniture’ works, including a gloriously British cartoon, in which a man flicks his cigarette into the bosom of a statue based on Standing Figure, only to be grabbed by another, who shouts: ‘That 'ashtray' happens to be my wife!’ (Allen Jones, Allen Jones - Copied From a Higher Priced Original, Idea, 2018, p.34)

If Pop Art’s central idea is to take the immediately recognisable from ‘popular’ or ‘low’ culture (icons of the commercial and industrial) and harness their visual and narrative power as art, then it follows that for any Pop Art object, the ultimate validation should surely be its own re-immersion back into the world of shopping, advertising and movies. Warhol’s art of appropriation has been re-appropriated countless times, to the point that the ‘Warhol look’ comes as a filter on the photo app of your phone. The immediate success of Jones’s ‘furniture’ works - sculptures that bent the idea of sculpture - is best measured, then, by Stanley Kubrick’s re-imagining of them as actual furniture in his brutal, highly-acclaimed 1971 adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ distopian novel, A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick had approached Jones to use the sculptures themselves; instead, the artist gave his blessing for Kubrick to make versions inspired by his works but very much distinct. The furniture created by set designer Liz Moore for the Korova Milk Bar interior harnesses the overt sexuality of Jones’s sculptures, yet allies it very specifically to the movie’s central themes of violence, domination and submission. As such, Jones was wise to eschew direct involvement in the film: key to his statement with these pieces is that they have a neutrality, both of his intention and of possible meaning. 

Standing Figure (Hatstand) - along with Chair and Table - has an irresistible impact: whatever you might think of it, you can’t help but look at it. It stands very deliberately in the viewer’s space - the sheepskin rug cleverly hiding the base plate (needed to keep a figure of such exaggerated proportion standing), so there is no sense of where real life ends and ‘art’ begins. Is this a sculpture of (supposedly) a real woman? There seems to be  all sorts of influences, both subversive and underground (revolving around fetishism) and mainstream: the ‘Swinging Sixties’, after all, had managed to combine real political and social liberation with a vastly increased sexualised depiction of women - a conundrum perhaps best understood in the mini-skirt, that great Sixties (female) invention, that even at the time was a complex cipher of female empowerment and male gratification.

This is what makes a work such as Standing Figure (Hatstand) so brilliant - yet, equally, so challenging. It is not clear what Jones’s position is on the commodification of a woman’s body into (seemingly) an item of domestic furniture. It’s surely a critique? And yet it - deliberately - plays dumb. Jones himself has added to this mystique as to what it might mean. His statements on the works always appeal to the openness of their meaning and are non-commital: his commitment, rather, is to the viewer’s right to bring to these works what they will. This is where Pop Art is at its best: in the absence of the artist’s intention, the viewer must fill the void. How we look at Standing Figure is a test for us: men and women are going to see it differently and even then, meaning is going to be conflicted and elusive. And all the while, the figure stands there, defiant. 

The exaggeration of the form of Standing Figure (Hatstand) - all comic book, hardly naturalistic - suggests she is not intended to be ‘real’. Is she a fantasy then? Her clothes - based on contemporary fetish wear - seem to suggest this. But there’s something in her super-flat machine surface and the insistent perfection of it all that pervades the work with a coolness that is at odds with fantasy. Andy Warhol understood that what makes a great Pop Art object is the total absence of the artist’s point of view - that if the artist’s critical position is easily understood, then Pop is no different from earlier forms (Dada, Surrealism) that appropriated the everyday into art. Essential to this idea is the removal of all traces of authorship. For Warhol, this led to the creation of his Factory, so that whether he himself made the work becomes irrelevant; Lichtenstein, although he actually did paint his own pictures, hides his authorship through appropriating both language and technique of comic books. For Jones, with this series of sculptures, it was key that the idea was executable to mechanical perfection: '... these sculptures come out of a programme which was really an artistic problem of depicting the figure in a way which was devoid of any reassuring signs that it was fine art. My only anxiety was that, although I knew they would be interesting objects, they might not be perceived as art' (Allen Jones, quoted in Andrew Lambirth, Allen Jones - Works, RA Publishing, London, 2005, p.32). To achieve this, Jones becomes less ‘sculptor’ and more ‘director’ as Robert Melville pointed out in his 1970 article for Vogue, entitled ‘Pop in Effigy - The Happy Home of Allen Jones: A Wife and Two Dollies’ (actually Standing Figure and Table). Melville writes: ‘Everyone who knows Allen Jones’s paintings will agree that the effigies disclose his formal preoccupations at every turn: but he has not made them’. (Vogue, January 1970, reproduced in Lambirth, op. cit., p.75). 

The fibreglass body was created according to Jones’s designs by Gem Wax Models, who made waxworks for Madam Tussauds; the bodies, having been sprayed and rubbed down to give an impeccable flesh-tinted finish were then hand painted by Lucia Della Rocca; leather accessories were made by John Sutcliffe of Atomage; wigs by Beyond the Fringe; the see-through bolero by his friend, the designer Zandra Rhodes. The present work has had all her costume recently updated by the artist, using, as he did back in 1969, specialist makers of leather-wear (although the bolero is the original, restored). That all the accoutrements are perfect is key to Jones’s aesthetic, to keep the work shimmering between this world and something other-worldly, a comic-book perfection but in three dimensions and in real clothes (although the boots can’t actually be worn, as they have no soles).

Allen Jones’s ‘furniture’ works are without doubt one of the most important artworks to have been made in Britain during the 1960s. In May 2012 Sotheby’s sold all three ‘furniture’ works, from the collection of Gunter Sachs. Each work was originally estimated at £40,000-60,0000, a recognition of how unprecedented, at that point, it was to see them on the open market. It took a long-drawn out bidding war - each was sold for in excess of £900,000 - for the market to demonstrate what everyone involved knew: that these were indeed iconic works of global Pop.  

As the critic Andrew Lambirth notes in his 2006 monograph on the artist, ‘Pop Art has retained its significance and its influence, perhaps because it functions in the gap between art and life, partaking equally of both’ (Lambirth, op. cit. p.19). If one adds to this its open-endedness when it comes to meaning or the artist’s intention, this is why Pop can be both of its time and still relevant today. Standing Figure (Hatstand), without doubt, made for complex viewing in its day, as it does now - but it is in this complexity, our uncertainty, that its power as an art object lies.